Sorry, Tim Davie, the BBC is long past saving

Rejoice, rejoice! A new pilot has stepped aboard the Titanic, an hour after iceberg impact. Tim Davie, the latest director general of the BBC, is perceived by some hopeful conservatives as the new broom that will sweep away the Corporation’s “woke” bias and reform it into the neutral broadcasting institution it was intended to be. Such delusional thinking is an embarrassing example of the triumph of extravagant optimism over stark reality. The Archangel Gabriel could not reform the BBC, let alone Tim Davie.

That is not Davie’s fault. He has a good track record in business, unlike so many of his colleagues who have been nurtured under the womb-to-tomb umbrella of public-sector, arts-establishment patronage. More incongruously still, he is a Conservative: a former local government Tory candidate and quondam deputy chairman of the Hammersmith and Fulham Conservative Party. Within the BBC that makes him one of the few Conservatives among a staff of 35,000. 

Davie is sending out the right signals too: backtracking on the Last Night of the Proms, demanding an end to leftist monopoly in comedy and instructing employees to stop disseminating their own prejudices on social media. A litmus test of his purposefulness will be whether he claws back the £100 million recklessly committed to promoting “diversity” or goes with the leftist flow. He has already set his face against a switch from the licence fee to subscription.

Such questions are now largely academic. It is all far too little, far too late. Possibly, a director general with an agenda such as Tim Davie seems to intend could have turned the Corporation round in the 1990s, but there is no prospect of doing so now. The “woke” culture is too deeply ingrained: short of sacking 95% of the editorial staff and presenters, how could a genuine reform be implemented? The BBC is into approximately its third generation of biased broadcasters, puffed up with entitlement and self-righteousness. Only dissolution of this discredited institution can now solve the problem. 

The rot set in a long time ago. In 2006, after the Corporation’s navel-gazing exercise in investigating its own bias, Andrew Marr complacently declared that “the BBC is not impartial or neutral, it has a liberal bias, not so much a party-political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias.”

In 2011, Peter Sissons observed: “At the core of the BBC, in its very DNA, is a way of thinking that is firmly of the Left”.

Last year John Humphrys, on retiring after presenting the Today programme for 32 years, wrote in his memoirs of the BBC’s “institutional liberal bias”, claiming that the Corporation “tried to mould the nation into its own liberal-left image” and that its staff continued to “confuse their own interests with those of the wider world”.

 Humphrys wrote that BBC executives were devastated by the Leave victory in the referendum and described their expressions as resembling a football fan whose team had just missed a penalty. “I’m not sure the BBC as a whole ever quite had a real grasp of what was going on in Europe, or of what people in this country thought about it,” he said.

The BBC did not try very hard to find out. On the Today programme, between 2005 and 2015 – on Humphrys’ watch – 4,275 guests were invited to speak on the topic of the EU, of whom just 132 (3.2%) were Leavers. Those figures from the News-watch archive of monitored BBC broadcasts were published by Civitas in 2018. The BBC, as it loves to tell the world, is most conscientious about balance – but only between political parties. By focusing on Tory and Labour Remainers, it was easy to maintain party balance while perpetrating extreme bias on the issue itself.

BBC bias is sustained by an extravagant sense of entitlement, to the extent of believing it is acceptable to extort £154.50 annually from every television owner to support the Corporation in the style to which it is accustomed. And what a style that is. It takes the enforced contributions of 11,363 licence fee helots to keep national treasure Gary Lineker (BBC salary £1.75 million) on our television screens.

 The Corporation extorts £3.6 billion in licence fees; of the remaining £1.2 billion of income supposedly derived from commercial activities, a significant proportion comes from government (i.e. taxpayer) grants. Its use of its unjustifiable criminal sanctions against licence fee defaulters accounts for 10% of prosecutions in magistrates’ courts, a further imposition on public resources. In 2018 more than 121,000 people were convicted of licence evasion and received criminal records; five were imprisoned. Historically, the classic profile of an imprisoned defaulter has been a single mother, whose children had to be cared for at public expense.

 A review under the Cameron government came down against decriminalising licence fee default; this time the clever money is on the outcome being different. With the criminal sanction removed, licence fee payment will dwindle to a trickle and the system will be unsustainable. What then? Will Gary Lineker be reduced to a six-figure salary? The licence fee will have to be abolished. That presents the prospect of the magisterial Corporation having to compete in the open market with Netflix and Amazon Prime; good luck with that, Auntie.

That is the emerging trajectory of the BBC’s demise: licence fee decriminalisation, abolition, failed competition, then a slicing and dicing of assets. A supposedly free Western democracy does not need a state broadcaster; indeed, respect for liberties dictates it must not have such an incubus. The BBC belongs to that category of abuses which have only been tolerated because they have existed for so long as to become part of the landscape and therefore remain unchallenged.

Its other support system, as was the case with EU membership, is the social pressure on anybody remotely connected to the establishment to conform to the consensus of drivelling sycophancy towards the fetishised Corporation. To question the sacred cow status of the BBC, in polite circles, is to simulate the central figure in a Bateman cartoon, “The man who…” That is why, despite the enormous influence the BBC has undoubtedly had, over decades, in demonising anything conservative, there are still many Tory MPs whose knee-jerk reaction is to defend it. In the era of the ex-Red Wall Conservative voter, such a response would be that of turkeys voting for Christmas. 

Remainer-style snobbery is an allied factor: “Do you want Britain to go down the same road as America, with a television station like Fox?” Leaving aside, the fact that Fox television is a private corporation with the right to embrace any political stance it chooses, unlike a publicly funded, royal chartered public-service broadcaster, the reality is that Britain already has a Fox channel, but of the Left instead of the Right: Weasel television, commonly known as the BBC. For the sceptical public, “BBC bias” is now one word.

As used to be said of failing Chinese imperial dynasties, the BBC has exhausted the mandate of Heaven. Its time has passed. Its more intelligent denizens will be hoping that, by implementing some minor reforms, Tim Davie will reassure Tory wets, causing them to stay the Government’s hand and buy the Corporation time until a Labour government arrives to confirm its mission to infuse the cult of wokeness into every corner of British life. 

It is too late for radical reform: this tanker cannot be turned around over a thousand miles. The reality is that the progression of history has deprived the new director general of the power to retrieve the situation: in that respect, his position is comparable to the last Viceroy of Ireland.